The other day on my drive home listening to what I was hoping would be politics-free sports radio, the hosts were discussing how football, baseball, and basketball fans would react if one of the players on their favorite teams made a public announcement that he was gay. The hosts opined that “especially in red state Texas”, fans would not tolerate it, although in “progressive” Austin, it wouldn’t be a problem.

Based on “red staters” I know, that’s a specious conclusion. Whenever I run into this kind of thing, I like to swap things, and imagine what would happen to a team’s support from PC progressives if a team star openly said something like “Sarah Palin’s facebook posts make for more sound domestic and foreign policy than anything I’ve seen from the Obama Whitehouse.”

We already see how this plays out in entertainment, where even on sites like Big Hollywood, contributors still sometimes use pseudonyms to protect their employability. We’ll also see what happens to David Mamet now that he’s “been mugged by reality.”